January 24, 2023 • 10 mins
Topics included in this episode -
- Renee Jain is an award-winning tech entrepreneur turned speaker and certified life coach and she spoke to Justin about anxiety and how it plays it in young children.
- Renee is the founder of GoZen! - which helps kids with their emotional wellbeing.
Find us on Facebook at Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families
Email us your questions and comments at podcasts@happyfamilies.com.au
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the Happy Families podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just answers me.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now, Hello, this is doctor Justin Coulson. Thank you so
much for joining me as we move towards the end
of the school holidays. A little while ago, we did
this really cool, really cool summit with Happy Families. It
was called Little People, Big Feelings, and one of my
favorite Americans, a lady by the name of Reenie Jane,
who runs a website that you might have heard of
called go Zen with loads of fantastic resources. You have
(00:32):
to check out go Zen. Rene joined me on the
Little People, Big Feelings Summit to talk about well, anxiety
and all those other big feelings that little kids have.
I asked Renie about anxiety. I asked her, how do
we define it, how do we see it in children,
especially young kids under six? And here's what she said.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I define it in a very lee way, which is
a massive that your body is sending you. And I
know that doesn't sound like, hey, what does that mean? Right?
But that is the definition for me of any emotion.
Your emotions, your feelings are essentially messengers, their data points,
their pieces of communication. So anxiety is just one of
(01:18):
those things. How it manifests in our little ones can
be in many, many different ways. Most of the time,
child under the age of six is not going to
say I'm feeling anxious, right, We're going to see it manifesting,
perhaps in a meltdown. Maybe they'll say, my tummy feels funny.
(01:39):
Maybe they'll say I'm having a hard time sleeping. So
there can be many, many manifestations of it, but it
is it's a feeling, right, So, anxiety, like many many
other feelings on the spectrum of human emotions, is just
another one of our feelings that appears.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
The fact that it's just this information coming through feelings
to a child. Some children get very very anxious about
their anxiety, and some parents get very very anxious about
their children's anxiety. When does anxiety become a problem, Because
the reality is, all of our feelings kind of do
exactly what you're talking about, right, They convey this information
to us. But anxiety becomes problematic sometimes and at other
(02:22):
times it's actually perfectly healthy. It's normal. It's actually functional
rather than dysfunctional. Where's that line? How do we know?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah, So, when we are not able to navigate through
our feelings or not able to actually process the worry.
That's when it becomes a problem, when it starts to
interrupt our general functioning, when it starts to create disturbance
to the point where we can't sleep, you know, or
maybe not able to do our school work. We are
(02:51):
complaining about it all the time. Maybe there are other
manifestations such as anger or eruptions, you know, when it
becomes when it starts to interrupt our ability to function generally,
then it starts to become a problem. But really the
issue is and sometimes it just sounds so simple that
it's like that can't be the issue. I mean, the
diagnosis is rampant, right, the problem is pervasive. It's a
(03:15):
global epidemic, frankly anxiety. But really the issue is their
unprocessed emotions. Right, We're having these flare ups of worry,
and that triggers a flare up of worry. As you
said justin within the parent, Oh my goodness, my child
is worried. So now I'm worried. And so we start
(03:36):
to do things like quash the worry, run away from
the worry, ignore the worry. Right, we don't sit with it,
we don't listen to the message it's sending. We don't
try to figure out, well, what signal am I getting?
What should I do with this worry? We think it's
something wrong with us. And so that's when it starts
to become a problem when it's not processed.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Directions that I want to take that last comment and
I'm going to try to tease them apart bit by bit.
The first thing that really stands out to me is
you're talking about it's an unprocessed emotion. And yet for
our little people, for our children, children under five or six,
they I mean, every emotion is unprocessed, isn't it. They
(04:22):
don't really have the developmental capacity to process their emotions.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
You know what's so funny. I actually think they come
into the world as masters at emotional processing, because when
you see a very young child, you will see that
they can go from zero to one hundred, you know,
in a moment. Let's take an example of two siblings
fighting with each other, right, they're fighting over a toy,
They're yelling at each other, they're screaming, maybe one of
(04:48):
them's in the corner, and then three minutes later they're
best friends. That is the ultimate ability to process the emotion,
the emotion actually comes into them. It's temporary, they feel it,
they show it, right, So there's the manifestation of the emotion,
and then it passes. So for many of us, it
(05:08):
is unprocessed because we don't allow it to pass. We
don't allow the feeling to come into us, send the message,
and then interact with it. Right, there's no relationship. We
basically try to ignore it or get rid of it.
So I actually think in their own way, and I
know what you're saying. You know, they don't know how
to process these big feelings. They might not know what
(05:28):
to do with them, but I feel like they can
naturally process them if we as parents allow the space
for it and then facilitate the processing.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
We're going to talk about the facilitation in just to say,
but I got to say what you've just described infuriates
parents because it's like you kids were just throwing blocks
at each other's heads. You know, you've got a three
year old and a four year old try to beat
each other up, and they're biting and pulling hair and scratching,
and it's so frustrating for a parent, and the parent
(06:02):
wants to do all this stuff and literally ninety seconds later,
these two kids are best friends again. They're hugging and
they're playing, and it's like it never happened.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
They've processed their emotions, they've done their own conflict resolution,
they've figured it out. Meanwhile, our hair has turned completely gray.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Right, They're in the moment, they're having the emotion, and
then they seem to move through it and get on
with life. Like you said, we seem to want to
sit with it. So I guess to pull the threads
from the previous question this one together and move to
the practical stuff. A couple of times now, you've talked
about this idea of allowing the emotion to be of helping. Well,
(06:40):
I guess we've probably got to do a bit of
work ourselves. But how do we What are the mistakes
that parents are making. Let's talk about the mistakes first,
and then how we can overcome those mistakes to get
the kinds of outcomes that we're looking that is balanced,
happy little people.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah. I mean, the first miss stak that we make
is we're taking probably for many many of us, the
training that we had as kids with our parents in
assuming that there are a certain set of emotions that
we need to see from our kids. We want them
to be happy. We want them to be joyful, we
want them to be grateful, we want them to be cheery.
And when we see the other ones, we see anger,
(07:19):
and we see jealousy, and we see worry, and we
see all of these other bad emotions. It scares us, right,
and so we are afraid of half of the human
spectrum of emotions, which is a problem. Obviously, we don't
see purpose in those emotions, and so as soon as
we see it as a parent, we get triggered. We're triggered,
(07:41):
and then with the triggering, you know, this can go
in so many different directions. Sometimes we are catastrophic thinkers.
Not sometimes oftentimes, oh, my goodness, my child is worrying
at this young age of under six, they're five years old,
and maybe they worry so much they have to sleep
next to me at night, and you know, or they
can't do something, they can't go to school, or they
(08:02):
don't want to socialize, and so how are they going
to handle life? My goodness. Catastrophic thinking goes in usually
three directions. It ends up where your child is either
going to be in jail on drugs or homeless. Right,
like they're always my five year old can't sleep alone
at night, so therefore they're never going to get a job. Right.
So we go wrong in thinking that there's going to
(08:24):
be some tragic ripple effect, and we are again based
on our own conditioning of being scared of these big feelings.
They make us incredibly uncomfortable. So the messaging that we're
often sending to our kids with great intention and trust me,
I have a seven and eight year old and they
are very loud spirited kids with big feelings, right. But
(08:48):
the message we often send to our young ones is
listen your big feelings. They're making me uncomfortable. I would
like you to go into a calm down corner, you know,
if we're very conscious we're not putting them in time
out or can't we're in a time in right, and
go get rid of those big feelings and come back
when you have the feelings that I'm more comfortable with.
(09:10):
So the first message that we need to send our
kids is your feelings are valid. You know I can
hold space for them, I can handle them. I understand
that when you're disregulated that you need me to lean on.
You need my regulation. You need to borrow mine. But
I can only do that if I'm able to stand
(09:33):
strong in my own understanding that this is all okay.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
That's Renie Jane, the founder of go Zen. You can
find her online by doing a quick google Reniere Nae
Jane j A. I n Renie Jane from go Zen.
And that was the part of a conversation that we
were having about little people and big feelings from the
Little People Big Feelings Summit. If you'd like more information
out how you can help your little people deal with
(10:01):
their big feelings, but please check out the summer. Just
google Happy Families dot com dot au and type in
little People, Big Feelings the summer will come up and
you can grab hold of that for a lot of
really use resources. Hey, Kylie and I were back tomorrow
as we move towards the end of our Happy Families
Summer podcast series. See you then,
It's the Happy Families podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just answers me.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now, Hello, this is doctor Justin Coulson. Thank you so
much for joining me as we move towards the end
of the school holidays. A little while ago, we did
this really cool, really cool summit with Happy Families. It
was called Little People, Big Feelings, and one of my
favorite Americans, a lady by the name of Reenie Jane,
who runs a website that you might have heard of
called go Zen with loads of fantastic resources. You have
(00:32):
to check out go Zen. Rene joined me on the
Little People, Big Feelings Summit to talk about well, anxiety
and all those other big feelings that little kids have.
I asked Renie about anxiety. I asked her, how do
we define it, how do we see it in children,
especially young kids under six? And here's what she said.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I define it in a very lee way, which is
a massive that your body is sending you. And I
know that doesn't sound like, hey, what does that mean? Right?
But that is the definition for me of any emotion.
Your emotions, your feelings are essentially messengers, their data points,
their pieces of communication. So anxiety is just one of
(01:18):
those things. How it manifests in our little ones can
be in many, many different ways. Most of the time,
child under the age of six is not going to
say I'm feeling anxious, right, We're going to see it manifesting,
perhaps in a meltdown. Maybe they'll say, my tummy feels funny.
(01:39):
Maybe they'll say I'm having a hard time sleeping. So
there can be many, many manifestations of it, but it
is it's a feeling, right, So, anxiety, like many many
other feelings on the spectrum of human emotions, is just
another one of our feelings that appears.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
The fact that it's just this information coming through feelings
to a child. Some children get very very anxious about
their anxiety, and some parents get very very anxious about
their children's anxiety. When does anxiety become a problem, Because
the reality is, all of our feelings kind of do
exactly what you're talking about, right, They convey this information
to us. But anxiety becomes problematic sometimes and at other
(02:22):
times it's actually perfectly healthy. It's normal. It's actually functional
rather than dysfunctional. Where's that line? How do we know?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah, So, when we are not able to navigate through
our feelings or not able to actually process the worry.
That's when it becomes a problem, when it starts to
interrupt our general functioning, when it starts to create disturbance
to the point where we can't sleep, you know, or
maybe not able to do our school work. We are
(02:51):
complaining about it all the time. Maybe there are other
manifestations such as anger or eruptions, you know, when it
becomes when it starts to interrupt our ability to function generally,
then it starts to become a problem. But really the
issue is and sometimes it just sounds so simple that
it's like that can't be the issue. I mean, the
diagnosis is rampant, right, the problem is pervasive. It's a
(03:15):
global epidemic, frankly anxiety. But really the issue is their
unprocessed emotions. Right, We're having these flare ups of worry,
and that triggers a flare up of worry. As you
said justin within the parent, Oh my goodness, my child
is worried. So now I'm worried. And so we start
(03:36):
to do things like quash the worry, run away from
the worry, ignore the worry. Right, we don't sit with it,
we don't listen to the message it's sending. We don't
try to figure out, well, what signal am I getting?
What should I do with this worry? We think it's
something wrong with us. And so that's when it starts
to become a problem when it's not processed.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Directions that I want to take that last comment and
I'm going to try to tease them apart bit by bit.
The first thing that really stands out to me is
you're talking about it's an unprocessed emotion. And yet for
our little people, for our children, children under five or six,
they I mean, every emotion is unprocessed, isn't it. They
(04:22):
don't really have the developmental capacity to process their emotions.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
You know what's so funny. I actually think they come
into the world as masters at emotional processing, because when
you see a very young child, you will see that
they can go from zero to one hundred, you know,
in a moment. Let's take an example of two siblings
fighting with each other, right, they're fighting over a toy,
They're yelling at each other, they're screaming, maybe one of
(04:48):
them's in the corner, and then three minutes later they're
best friends. That is the ultimate ability to process the emotion,
the emotion actually comes into them. It's temporary, they feel it,
they show it, right, So there's the manifestation of the emotion,
and then it passes. So for many of us, it
(05:08):
is unprocessed because we don't allow it to pass. We
don't allow the feeling to come into us, send the message,
and then interact with it. Right, there's no relationship. We
basically try to ignore it or get rid of it.
So I actually think in their own way, and I
know what you're saying. You know, they don't know how
to process these big feelings. They might not know what
(05:28):
to do with them, but I feel like they can
naturally process them if we as parents allow the space
for it and then facilitate the processing.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
We're going to talk about the facilitation in just to say,
but I got to say what you've just described infuriates
parents because it's like you kids were just throwing blocks
at each other's heads. You know, you've got a three
year old and a four year old try to beat
each other up, and they're biting and pulling hair and scratching,
and it's so frustrating for a parent, and the parent
(06:02):
wants to do all this stuff and literally ninety seconds later,
these two kids are best friends again. They're hugging and
they're playing, and it's like it never happened.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
They've processed their emotions, they've done their own conflict resolution,
they've figured it out. Meanwhile, our hair has turned completely gray.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Right, They're in the moment, they're having the emotion, and
then they seem to move through it and get on
with life. Like you said, we seem to want to
sit with it. So I guess to pull the threads
from the previous question this one together and move to
the practical stuff. A couple of times now, you've talked
about this idea of allowing the emotion to be of helping. Well,
(06:40):
I guess we've probably got to do a bit of
work ourselves. But how do we What are the mistakes
that parents are making. Let's talk about the mistakes first,
and then how we can overcome those mistakes to get
the kinds of outcomes that we're looking that is balanced,
happy little people.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah. I mean, the first miss stak that we make
is we're taking probably for many many of us, the
training that we had as kids with our parents in
assuming that there are a certain set of emotions that
we need to see from our kids. We want them
to be happy. We want them to be joyful, we
want them to be grateful, we want them to be cheery.
And when we see the other ones, we see anger,
(07:19):
and we see jealousy, and we see worry, and we
see all of these other bad emotions. It scares us, right,
and so we are afraid of half of the human
spectrum of emotions, which is a problem. Obviously, we don't
see purpose in those emotions, and so as soon as
we see it as a parent, we get triggered. We're triggered,
(07:41):
and then with the triggering, you know, this can go
in so many different directions. Sometimes we are catastrophic thinkers.
Not sometimes oftentimes, oh, my goodness, my child is worrying
at this young age of under six, they're five years old,
and maybe they worry so much they have to sleep
next to me at night, and you know, or they
can't do something, they can't go to school, or they
(08:02):
don't want to socialize, and so how are they going
to handle life? My goodness. Catastrophic thinking goes in usually
three directions. It ends up where your child is either
going to be in jail on drugs or homeless. Right,
like they're always my five year old can't sleep alone
at night, so therefore they're never going to get a job. Right.
So we go wrong in thinking that there's going to
(08:24):
be some tragic ripple effect, and we are again based
on our own conditioning of being scared of these big feelings.
They make us incredibly uncomfortable. So the messaging that we're
often sending to our kids with great intention and trust me,
I have a seven and eight year old and they
are very loud spirited kids with big feelings, right. But
(08:48):
the message we often send to our young ones is
listen your big feelings. They're making me uncomfortable. I would
like you to go into a calm down corner, you know,
if we're very conscious we're not putting them in time
out or can't we're in a time in right, and
go get rid of those big feelings and come back
when you have the feelings that I'm more comfortable with.
(09:10):
So the first message that we need to send our
kids is your feelings are valid. You know I can
hold space for them, I can handle them. I understand
that when you're disregulated that you need me to lean on.
You need my regulation. You need to borrow mine. But
I can only do that if I'm able to stand
(09:33):
strong in my own understanding that this is all okay.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
That's Renie Jane, the founder of go Zen. You can
find her online by doing a quick google Reniere Nae
Jane j A. I n Renie Jane from go Zen.
And that was the part of a conversation that we
were having about little people and big feelings from the
Little People Big Feelings Summit. If you'd like more information
out how you can help your little people deal with
(10:01):
their big feelings, but please check out the summer. Just
google Happy Families dot com dot au and type in
little People, Big Feelings the summer will come up and
you can grab hold of that for a lot of
really use resources. Hey, Kylie and I were back tomorrow
as we move towards the end of our Happy Families
Summer podcast series. See you then,
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